Switches to Support NFV

PROGRAMMABLE SWITCHES FOR EASY, FAST AND COST-EFFECTIVE DEPLOYMENT OF NFV

NoviFlow’s NoviSwitch leverages Network Processors (NPUs) to implement a fully programmable switching and routing fabric with the agility, table capacity and scalability needed to economically deploy and manage NFV solutions. This scale-out approach generates savings in both CAPEX and OPEX, as well as providing a more flexible, responsive and programmable routing infrastructure far better equipped to deal with the challenges of exponentially growing numbers of connected devices, vastly changed usage patterns, and is much better able to exploit new software based solutions for network optimization.

THE OLD SOLUTIONS JUST DON'T WORK ANYMORE

Despite the last twenty years’ breakthroughs in data center compute and storage, or even perhaps because of them, rising network costs remain an inescapable issue. Networking technology lags significantly behind compute and storage in taking advantage of virtualization and disaggregation, resulting rigid all-in-one designs, vendor lock-in, the multiplication of protocols, proprietary interfaces, non-deterministic network behavior, and a very limited ability to interact meaningfully with the applications and services that use network resources. Unlike compute and storage, the network neither scales-up, nor scales out, placing limitations on the benefits of Hyperscale architectures and causing major headaches to data center and network managers.

The networking industry sees NFV (Network Function Virtualization) as the solution to leveraging virtualization in the network itself, and the explosive growth in the use of NFV for an ever-expanding array of applications has provided real benefits, but at the cost of increased network complexity, challenging long standing assumptions and ideas about how networks should be built.

THE NOVISWITCH DIFFERENCE

Unlike legacy network equipment, NoviFlow’s NoviSwitches have architected from the ground-up to deliver a networking fabric optimized for implementing programmable forwarding planes: very large table sizes, multiple tables, packet payload matching and traffic handling at line rate for even hyperscale networks.

NoviSwitches uses Network Processors (NPUs), which provide both high throughput and full programmability. When combined with NoviFlow’s NoviWare NOS, NoviSwitch provides a silicon based forwarding plane that is 2 to 3 orders of magnitude faster than x86 processors, yet can deliver the fully programmable packet pipeline needed to provide both the agility and scalability required by today’s networks.

This approach allows central control of handling of all aspects of the virtual connections needed to support NFV, in all areas where VNFs get exposed directly to the network: network gateways, access or aggregation switches or even at the Top-of-Rack. In these solutions, NoviSwitches transparently take on all packet processing and redirection tasks for servers supporting NFV. NoviFlow’s NoviSwitches connect transparently to OpenStack via the OpenFlow Controller using the Neutron plug-in, greatly simplifying installation, deployment and management of network services such as routing, tunneling, monitoring, security filtering, metering, service chaining, load balancing, time stamping and other flow-tasks, all at line-rate as part of network fabric

This enables the data center to recover up to 60% of the capacity lost to OvS overhead, and to deliver the same processing capacity at less than 80% the cost!